Coastal Crown selected for inshore geotechnical surveys

Recently a campaign started, taking samples to establish the soil conditions on the design route of a power export cable for the future Dutch Offshore Wind Park “Nederwiek”, between the port of Stellendam and the onshore power and transformer station in Geertruidenberg. GEOxyz from Belgium has been selected by TenneT to carry out geophysical and geotechnical surveys for the export cable route for the Nederwiek 3 Offshore Wind Farm (NW3) in The Netherlands.

“The aim of the surveys is to investigate the suitability of the envisaged cable corridor, establish the topography of the seabed, and identify obstructions in the corridor and build a geological model of the cable corridor that will be used as input for the cable burial assessment” says Alex Filius, GEOxyz project manager for the inshore scope. ”The geophysical scope of works have been done with GEOxyz’s own vessels. For the shallow inshore waters of the Haringvliet, Hollands Diep and Amer river we found Coastal Crown a perfect match,” Filius adds. The vessel is used as a stable, shallow drafted platform accommodating various equipment and staff.

Captain Sinclair McWilliam, project operations manager from Acta Marine adds: “Particularly when a lot of different samples from numerous locations need to be taken, Coastal Crown provides an efficient solution. The vessel can shift quickly between locations, uses no anchors but still has excellent and secure station keeping capabilities with its DP-2 system, keeping the vessel exactly above any equipment that is being deployed to the bottom, either river- or seabed.”

McWilliam concludes with explaining that the vessels’ own fuel consumption and emissions are minimized, as power is provided from IMO TIER III certified diesel generators combined with a battery package. “The battery package basically stores any redundant energy from the generators to be used during moments where a higher power output is demanded. This leads to optimum load of the generators, cleaner combustion and reduces total running hours of the engines significantly,” he says.

Since the new delivery of Coastal Crown in 2021, the vessel has mainly been working in the Offshore Energy transition, assisting with shallow water sections of cable installation and burials. The vessel previously was active on various Offshore Wind parks like Hollandse Kust (noord), London Array and a Taiwanese Offshore Wind project. Meanwhile other cable scopes were done off Oostende (Belgium), in the Baltic and in the Red Sea, making the vessel a real globe trotter.